Prompted by Jon Stahl’s entry on the PloneBlog I want to point you to one of the more tangible results of my participation in this year’s Snow Sprint, namely Plone Improvement Proposal (PLIP) #128 a.k.a. Pluggable Plone Syndication – the collective brainchild of Ben Ackland and Rick Hurst from Netsight, Nate Aune and yours truly.

The idea behind it is to get rid of the necessity for dedicated blog products and blog-specific content types in Plone and to treat blogging less like a product and more as a use case. To this end we’ve started to create generic feed templates using Zope3 views, interfaces and adapters (via Five) for all ATCT types and a clean way for 3rd-party developers to create adapters for their content types (i.e. ATAudio to create podcasts).

After initial struggles with the new Zope3 approach (and lots of wrestling with Jean-Francoir’s and Russ’s z3-enabled-branch of ATCT – thanks for your patience, guys!) we’re happy to have been able to implement a working proof-of-concept by the very last day of the sprint ;-)

What now remains is lots of cleaning up and polishing. Ben has already contacted me about getting that underway, but since we’re both swamped with paying-the-rent type of work, we don’t expect to get back to that until next week. For those of you interested in the project, I suggest subscribing to the RSS-feed of our changelog. Any feedback is more than welcome – if we get this one right, Plone could become the über-blogsoftware ;-)